3 ms·

I imagine a lot of things look not all that hard when you're trying to build a rocket that can go to space, come back down and neatly land itself on a helipad..

I imagine a lot of things look not all that hard when you're trying to build a rocket that can go to space, come back down and neatly land itself on a helipad...

maxxxxx 12y ago
To me that sounds much easier than an autonomous car that has to work any time, deal with pedestrians, things falling off other cars, rain, snow, ice and many other unpredictable factors.
- taf2 12y ago
  I think those thing all on their own is not the hard problem - the hard problem is deciding whether to avoid the child crossing the street by driving over the cliff or slamming into the oncoming traffic...
  - sumitviii 12y ago
    That's just a dark scenario of parent's problem.
    - taf2 12y ago
      well - yeah it's pretty dark scenario... but it's an extreme example of why it's a harder problem IMO to solve than a rocket landing back on earth. You have multiple cases simple or complex where a decision must be made to either drive over a pot hole or drive into the oncoming traffic lane or off the road altogether. I'm certain a computer controlled car can make these decisions faster than a human driver, but much like a computer can typically not always judge the difference between my sarcastic comment and it's literal meaning it I would imagine have a difficult time solving these problems... maybe NP problems are solvable now? Don't get me wrong as a parent - I am super excited that perhaps - just perhaps, my kids when they are ready to hit the road won't have to worry about learning how to drive :D and I can rest easy the other drivers won't be crazy too.
      - clarky07 12y ago
        Everyone who wants to take the other side of the self driving car argument brings up stuff like this. Also they say what about icy roads and bad weather etc. Guess what, humans also suck at this. What would YOU do? Do you hit the oncoming traffic, drive off the cliff, hit the kid? Likely the right choice is to slam on the breaks and hope for the best. That's likely the same choice the computer would make, only it will have a faster reaction time making it more likely for the kid to make it. We kill 30,000 people a year driving. Humans suck at driving as a general rule. Will a self driving car be able to handle icy foggy roads? Probably not. And it will note that ahead of time and say dude you really shouldn't be going out in this, I can't handle it. If you want to try it, you'll have to drive yourself today.
  - agildehaus 12y ago
    I think a driverless car would just slam on the breaks, and do so much quicker than you or I ever could. And why is it always a child? You sound like a politician trying to make a "think of the children" argument.
  - bsder 12y ago
    Except that when you have self-driving cars, those other cars are making similar decisions and opening a hole for a car that just might need to avoid that child. This is why self-driving cars are going to be far safer than humans. Your self-driving cars will see a thousand hazardous situations as you are driving and adjust to avoid them pre-emptively and silently. Yes, there will be some bugs on the way there. And it will kill a few people. But we kill about 30,000 people in car crashes per year and about 5,000 pedestrians per year with cars. The programs could be quite buggy, and still beat that by I suspect a very wide margin.
    - brianobush 12y ago
      The decade or so long problem is the mix of self-driving cars and those piloted by humans. And yes, the benefits will be obvious.
  - bsder 12y ago
    As if humans are any better at this decision? Very few humans can execute split-second, emergency decisions correctly. Most simply panic and whatever happens, happens.
  - robbrown451 12y ago
    I don't think that is so hard, given that it can make more common (i.e. less contrived) decisions all the time. In that case, various priorities would be weighted, and those weights can be adjusted to perform as their designers and society prefers, in various simulated scenarios. Are you asking whether the life of the child should be given more priority than the life of the occupant? Who knows. Regardless, my bet is the car will perform better, by any measure, than a human. If only by being a lot quicker to respond and avoid the situation entirely. I think the tough problems involve communication and negotiation with other drivers. A car might have a hard time detecting eye contact, or noticing when someone is waving you to go ahead. It might also be bad at being aggressive enough to merge. But some of these things human drivers are really bad at....especially new drivers or the elderly, both of whom are often timid. People might be able to see that it is an autonomous car and be more likely to take advantage of the fact that they know the car won't do anything rash like risk an accident to force its way in. The nice thing is that these cars are going to keep a lot of data. Some people may not like that, but I don't think it's a bad thing that if you keep driving dangerously, the autonomous cars are going to note your license plate number and your insurance company is going to find out.
  - joosters 12y ago
    That decision is the easy problem. No sensors right now can reliably identify a cliff or a child, even in optimal conditions.
  - jboy55 12y ago
    The hard problem isn't a technical one, in my opinion. Lets say we include an 'emergency stop' button on the autonomous cars. It will be early on, when the autonomous car decides wrong or doesn't detect the kid, and the lone passenger wasn't paying attention and/or was drinking. The question will be, was the human responsible? Should he/she have hit the 'stop' button, and was their intoxication the reason why. Will they be charged with vehicular manslaughter?
- woofyman 12y ago
  Also, construction zones, traffic cops, parking garages
diego 12y ago
It's really not a hard technical problem at this point. It's mostly social and political. Think about the typical car out there: - You need a piece of plastic and metal to unlock it. Losing that object is a serious inconvenience, especially if you're on a road trip. Compare that to unlocking your cellphone or your bank account. - It doesn't have a "settings" functionality. For example, you can't configure a car to refuse to move if a seatbelt is unbuckled. Such a feature (perhaps a default that you can disable if you really want to) would save many lives. - It would be easy to write an app to help you optimize your driving for safety / fuel efficiency if you could download data that most cars have, but you can't. - Your car could warn you if you're approaching a red light or a stop sign and not slowing down. It's trivial, and it would save lives. These are just a few examples of ways in which most cars in the market are archaic and inefficient. This is mostly because of two reasons: the incumbents have no incentive to make changes that don't increase sales, and governments don't pressure car manufacturers to include state-of-the-art life saving technology until it has existed for a LONG time and everyone knows about it: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/federal-legislation-makes-airbags-mandatory http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/federal-legislati... The difficulty in making self-driven cars the norm is mostly about the politics of the transition.
- sjtrny 12y ago
  > Your car could warn you if you're approaching a red light or a stop sign and not slowing down. It's trivial, and it would save lives. It's definitely not trivial.
  - mikeash 12y ago
    It's not trivial from first principles, but traffic sign recognition is more or less a solved problem at this point (production Teslas read speed limit signs as you drive by them, for example) so it would be trivial to implement given what's available now.
    - gamblor956 12y ago
      Teslas being able to read a single format of signs is absolutely not indicative of their ability to read and recognize the hundreds of traffic signs in the US, many of which are located in non-standard positions. If traffic sign recognition really was a solved problem, every car manufacturer would have implemented it by now. If implementation really was trivial, we'd all be talking about which self-driving car we're going to buy this year, not when the first self-driving car might become available.

I imagine a lot of things look not all that hard when you're trying to build a rocket that can go to space, come back down and neatly land itself on a helipad...

maxxxxx 12y ago

To me that sounds much easier than an autonomous car that has to work any time, deal with pedestrians, things falling off other cars, rain, snow, ice and many other unpredictable factors.

taf2 12y ago
I think those thing all on their own is not the hard problem - the hard problem is deciding whether to avoid the child crossing the street by driving over the cliff or slamming into the oncoming traffic...
- sumitviii 12y ago
  That's just a dark scenario of parent's problem.
  - taf2 12y ago
    well - yeah it's pretty dark scenario... but it's an extreme example of why it's a harder problem IMO to solve than a rocket landing back on earth. You have multiple cases simple or complex where a decision must be made to either drive over a pot hole or drive into the oncoming traffic lane or off the road altogether. I'm certain a computer controlled car can make these decisions faster than a human driver, but much like a computer can typically not always judge the difference between my sarcastic comment and it's literal meaning it I would imagine have a difficult time solving these problems... maybe NP problems are solvable now? Don't get me wrong as a parent - I am super excited that perhaps - just perhaps, my kids when they are ready to hit the road won't have to worry about learning how to drive :D and I can rest easy the other drivers won't be crazy too.
    - clarky07 12y ago
      Everyone who wants to take the other side of the self driving car argument brings up stuff like this. Also they say what about icy roads and bad weather etc. Guess what, humans also suck at this. What would YOU do? Do you hit the oncoming traffic, drive off the cliff, hit the kid? Likely the right choice is to slam on the breaks and hope for the best. That's likely the same choice the computer would make, only it will have a faster reaction time making it more likely for the kid to make it. We kill 30,000 people a year driving. Humans suck at driving as a general rule. Will a self driving car be able to handle icy foggy roads? Probably not. And it will note that ahead of time and say dude you really shouldn't be going out in this, I can't handle it. If you want to try it, you'll have to drive yourself today.
- agildehaus 12y ago
  I think a driverless car would just slam on the breaks, and do so much quicker than you or I ever could. And why is it always a child? You sound like a politician trying to make a "think of the children" argument.
- bsder 12y ago
  Except that when you have self-driving cars, those other cars are making similar decisions and opening a hole for a car that just might need to avoid that child. This is why self-driving cars are going to be far safer than humans. Your self-driving cars will see a thousand hazardous situations as you are driving and adjust to avoid them pre-emptively and silently. Yes, there will be some bugs on the way there. And it will kill a few people. But we kill about 30,000 people in car crashes per year and about 5,000 pedestrians per year with cars. The programs could be quite buggy, and still beat that by I suspect a very wide margin.
  - brianobush 12y ago
    The decade or so long problem is the mix of self-driving cars and those piloted by humans. And yes, the benefits will be obvious.
- bsder 12y ago
  As if humans are any better at this decision? Very few humans can execute split-second, emergency decisions correctly. Most simply panic and whatever happens, happens.
- robbrown451 12y ago
  I don't think that is so hard, given that it can make more common (i.e. less contrived) decisions all the time. In that case, various priorities would be weighted, and those weights can be adjusted to perform as their designers and society prefers, in various simulated scenarios. Are you asking whether the life of the child should be given more priority than the life of the occupant? Who knows. Regardless, my bet is the car will perform better, by any measure, than a human. If only by being a lot quicker to respond and avoid the situation entirely. I think the tough problems involve communication and negotiation with other drivers. A car might have a hard time detecting eye contact, or noticing when someone is waving you to go ahead. It might also be bad at being aggressive enough to merge. But some of these things human drivers are really bad at....especially new drivers or the elderly, both of whom are often timid. People might be able to see that it is an autonomous car and be more likely to take advantage of the fact that they know the car won't do anything rash like risk an accident to force its way in. The nice thing is that these cars are going to keep a lot of data. Some people may not like that, but I don't think it's a bad thing that if you keep driving dangerously, the autonomous cars are going to note your license plate number and your insurance company is going to find out.
- joosters 12y ago
  That decision is the easy problem. No sensors right now can reliably identify a cliff or a child, even in optimal conditions.
- jboy55 12y ago
  The hard problem isn't a technical one, in my opinion. Lets say we include an 'emergency stop' button on the autonomous cars. It will be early on, when the autonomous car decides wrong or doesn't detect the kid, and the lone passenger wasn't paying attention and/or was drinking. The question will be, was the human responsible? Should he/she have hit the 'stop' button, and was their intoxication the reason why. Will they be charged with vehicular manslaughter?
woofyman 12y ago
Also, construction zones, traffic cops, parking garages

diego 12y ago

It's really not a hard technical problem at this point. It's mostly social and political. Think about the typical car out there: - You need a piece of plastic and metal to unlock it. Losing that object is a serious inconvenience, especially if you're on a road trip. Compare that to unlocking your cellphone or your bank account. - It doesn't have a "settings" functionality. For example, you can't configure a car to refuse to move if a seatbelt is unbuckled. Such a feature (perhaps a default that you can disable if you really want to) would save many lives. - It would be easy to write an app to help you optimize your driving for safety / fuel efficiency if you could download data that most cars have, but you can't. - Your car could warn you if you're approaching a red light or a stop sign and not slowing down. It's trivial, and it would save lives. These are just a few examples of ways in which most cars in the market are archaic and inefficient. This is mostly because of two reasons: the incumbents have no incentive to make changes that don't increase sales, and governments don't pressure car manufacturers to include state-of-the-art life saving technology until it has existed for a LONG time and everyone knows about it: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/federal-legislation-makes-airbags-mandatory http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/federal-legislati... The difficulty in making self-driven cars the norm is mostly about the politics of the transition.

sjtrny 12y ago
> Your car could warn you if you're approaching a red light or a stop sign and not slowing down. It's trivial, and it would save lives. It's definitely not trivial.
- mikeash 12y ago
  It's not trivial from first principles, but traffic sign recognition is more or less a solved problem at this point (production Teslas read speed limit signs as you drive by them, for example) so it would be trivial to implement given what's available now.
  - gamblor956 12y ago
    Teslas being able to read a single format of signs is absolutely not indicative of their ability to read and recognize the hundreds of traffic signs in the US, many of which are located in non-standard positions. If traffic sign recognition really was a solved problem, every car manufacturer would have implemented it by now. If implementation really was trivial, we'd all be talking about which self-driving car we're going to buy this year, not when the first self-driving car might become available.